We've become restaurant buddies with a guy that John has known since basic training and his wife, who happened to be sent to Italy at the same time we were. Tonight we found a new Italian restaurant--a tiny, hole-in-the-wall place where the entire seating area is in a tent outside the storefront. It was the first time we'd ventured beyond our tiny block-wide foraging radius near the base. Almost all of the hotel staff and most of the nearby restaurants reply in embarrassingly good English whenever I try to use my three words of Italian, so we hadn't needed to resort to elaborate mime techniques often.

It turns out that the distribution curve of "number of English words known by the average restaurant worker" drops off very steeply! The waitress at this place helpfully dug out two "inglese" menus for us, but that apparently exhausted their supply, so we also got two in Italian. Looking through, the menus were completely different. Not just the menu offerings, although the Italian menu did have more potentially American-unfriendly choices (think "spaghetti alla puttanesca" versus "spaghetti with ragu or tomato sauce"). The prices on a few of the identically-titled dishes were off by a few euros, for no apparent reason--not consistently higher prices for foolish Americans, but just random microvarations. (If I could get a job in Italy, I would make fat stacks of cash editing poorly-translated restaurant menus...)

After unsuccessfully trying to help our dinner companion convey her desire for plain pasta with olive oil and garlic (the waitress eventually gave up on our limited language skills and indicated that she should order off the freaking menu already), we all managed to order food. When a different waiter came back halfway through the meal, I explained that we wanted more water by flailing around saying "errrr, aqua?" and making the international gesture for "one about this big, please". He very politely said "Half a liter of water? Ok," while carefully not looking like he thought I was a total idiot. New goal: learn enough Italian to order food in complete sentences!

Dinner was great, though. And dessert was a tasty drink I'd never seen before, apparently a house specialty: a ball of lemon sorbet, drizzled with a melon-flavored creamy liqueur and served in a shotglass. We will be returning.

Also, next to a couple vending machines full of toys, there was an inexplicable underwear vending machine, lovingly installed at just the right height for any toddler who wanted to buy a sparkly rainbow thong after dinner. Italy: apparently it is secretly Japan Lite.

Edit: John just found out about this blog and is whining about the fact that I promised to describe him in a post more than a year ago and actually never got around to it. Now he is whining because I have threatened to describe him on the Internet. I CANNOT WIN.

Maybe next year?